Abstract
Employees in Hong Kong, like those in many other industrialized societies, face the competing demands of work and family. Long working hours and the associated problem of work–family conflict is a serious problem for the workforce. Although a number of family-friendly policies, such as the five-day working week, paternal leave and so on, have been introduced, they are not necessarily used to their fullest extent. This research examines the utilization of family-friendly incentives using a survey of 702 employees in Hong Kong with access to such measures. It adopted a well-established model of health care utilization, the Andersen model, to conceptualize the factors associated with the uptake of family-friendly policies. The results of the research demonstrate that the predisposing, enabling, and needs factors when applied to the Anderson model can significantly contribute to usage of family-friendly benefits. The study makes a number of significant contributions to the literature on work–life balance and the uptake of supportive measures, and shows that enabling (such as perceived effectiveness and perceived organisational culture on work-balance) and predisposing factors (education attainment and occupation) rather than need factors explain most of the variance in such use. The results also suggest that while the focus may be on needs factors such as family responsibility, as the deciding factors in utilization, it is the enabling and predisposing factors that contribute the most in explaining the variance in the use of family-friendly policies.
| Original language | English |
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| Publication status | Published - 2016 |